(Guide time: 50 minutes)

What is tagging?

If you’ve ever seen a subject heading on the library catalogue or a descriptor in a database you’ve already come across tagging. Many Web 2.0 applications use tagging. You will have seen tags on Flickr.com.





A tag is just a keyword or term used to describe something - highlighting why it's useful or what it's about.

You can add tags to web sites, pages, photos, blog posts, etc.

What is social bookmarking?

Bookmarking sites allow you to save and organise your links to a site on the internet for future reference (including articles, blogs and websites). You can view links other users on the same site have bookmarked (and the tags they've used) that may be of interest to you too. This sharing of links is known as social bookmarking.
Take a look at this commoncraft video Social Bookmarking in Plain English for more information.

Example

Delicious. is a social bookmarking site. Clicking on a tag in Delicious shows you all users' bookmarks that have been given that tag. The number of users that have bookmarked a specific link on delicious.com is also shown next to the link. Have a look at this screenshot, and note the tags that appear under each record.

Alternatives

• LibraryThing.com uses tags to describe the content of the books on the site
• Tag Galaxy presents an interesting visualisation of tags used on Flickr photo's
• StumbleUpon provides bookmarking and offers links it thinks you might be interested in

Why do this?

Social bookmarking sites also act as search engines. Use the search function to find bookmarks that match the subject for which you have searched. They are different to searching on sites like Google, as they bring back resources which have been chosen and tagged by people like you, rather than by a machine.

Social bookmarking allows you to discover resources other users have found that may be of interest to you as well. If you find somebody who is famous in a field that interests you, then their bookmarks are likely to interest you too.

As your links are saved on a site on the internet, you can access them from any computer with internet access - from home or work, in your home town or while you're on holiday in Australia.

(c) Webtreats on Flickr

Tag clouds

Tags are sometimes displayed in a tag cloud, which allow users to click on tags that have been used. This takes the user to any content tagged with that keyword. In some instances the popularity of a tag in a tag cloud is indicated by the size of the text – the bigger the font, the more popular the tag.


(c) http://www.wordle.net

How libraries use this

The University of Huddersfield display the most popular keyword tags on their library catalogue.
Cleveland Public Libraries have created a subject guide of useful websites that links to their bookmark pages on delicious.com
Brimbank Libraries in Australia have created a tag cloud subject guide of useful websites that appears on their website.

Activities

1. Set up a Delicious account and start bookmarking. Go to the Delicious home page and click on "Join", the link at the top of the page. This will take you to a sign in page, where you can create an account giving a user name, password and email address.

2. Once logged in you can bookmark and tag as many websites as you like (including your blog and this wiki):

• Click on 'Add link' (top right)
• Paste in a URL ie your blog address and click 'Save'
• On the next screen you can add other details such as a description and tags (subjects), and can make the link private if you want to keep it to yourself
• Click 'Save' and your new bookmark has been saved
• You can create 'stacks' if you want to bring certain bookmarks into a single category.

3. Go to Wordle.net and create a tag cloud by either entering some text or a delicious.com username ie your username

4. Write a blog post on your blog about the benefits of tagging and social bookmarking

Recommended followups

Tag article on Wikipedia
The Brave New World of Social Bookmarking (PDF), Amanda Etches-Johnson
The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging, Ellyssa Kroski


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